When I volunteered to do this review I quickly realized that I was asked to review 'Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Server' and not just 'Red Hat Linux'. Then panic set in. How different was this going to be from regular old Red Hat that I've used and relied on for years? Is this going to be a whole new Red Hat with a whole bunch of advanced features that I wouldn't be able to talk about either because I missed them or because I'm not qualified?

This is RHEL Advanced Server people, if you are an admin, and you do not know how to pick the apps to install, then why blame Redhat. The default install is most probably for people who want to be good to go in fifteen minutes. If you worry so much abotu security, read their Security Primer. Lock the box down yourself. If you do not want Apache installed, uncheck httpd. Its all available in Anaconda. You cannot simply slate Redhat for the choices they made. If we were to have a discussion over here about what should be on or off by default, we would not come to a consensus.